Archive for May, 2007

Sometimes in ASP.NET when you are trying to access a certain page you might get the following error:

External component has thrown an exception

In some other situations in .NET you might get this error as well (not directly related to ASP.NET, but sometimes to Interoping code or COM code), but this is beyond the scope of this post.

In the cases that I’ve stumbled upon, the reason is usually related to on-the-fly compilations ASP.NET performs when first accessing a certain page on an application.

The main problem with this exception that it is less than informative 🙂 . The only way of actually figuring out what is wrong (if this is indeed a case related to compilation error like I’m talking about) is to dig deep using WinDbg.

Luckily, every compilation that runs inside ASP.NET uses an API that upon encountering an error will create an object in the heap called CompilerError.

Make sure you have CLR exceptions enabled (see this previous post about how to enable CLR exceptions in WinDbg).

Try to access the page that is not working, it should throw an exception and WinDbg should break in.

Run the following command:

!dumpheap -type CompilerError

This should produce a list of all CompilerError objects which should allow us to inspect them and see the exact compilation error.

Now dump each of the objects using the following command:

!dumpobject 0xXXXX

Where 0xXXXX is the address of the objects listed in the list you got from the !dumpheap command.

At that point you should see the CompilerError object itself and you can dump its errorMessageText member (it’s address is near its name) using !dumpobject which should show you the exact compilation error.

In my case, the problem was that in the web.config file under the <compilation> / <assemblies> element there was no reference to one of the AJAX.NET assemblies (System.Web.Extensions) which caused the page to fail during on-the-fly compilation.

Do remember that this exception sometimes has nothing to do with compilation. If you don’t have any object of type CompilerError or there are a few but they make no sense in regards to the page you are accessing it might be something else.

The ASP.NET Repeater control is a very useful patten that minimizes code and allows you to use templates to represent repetitive data.

All of you are probably familiar with it and use it quite often.

Yesterday I had a big fight with the repeater control, and since most of the Internet (actually search engines for that matter) is filled with lots of data about the Repeater control and how to use it, I couldn’t find the answer I was looking for.

Apparently it was staring me right in the face.

The problem was that I needed to display a list of words with a comma separator and they should have looked like this:

word a, word b, word c, word d

but what I got was this:

word a , word b , word c , word d

An additional and unwanted extra space before the comma.

That code that I used in the ASPX file was this:

<asp:Repeater>

<ItemTemplate>

<% #Eval(“Text”) %>

</ItemTemplate>

<SeparatorTemplate>, </SeparatorTemplate>

</asp:Repeater>

All seems well, right? there is no space before the comma in the separator template, but there was when the whole thing was rendered.

The fix was quite stupid (and is quite fragile):

<asp:Repeater>

<ItemTemplate>

<% #Eval(“Text”) %></ItemTemplate>

<SeparatorTemplate>, </SeparatorTemplate>

</asp:Repeater>

The extra enter which placed the </ItemTemplate> element in a new line was the cause of this problem. That new line was translated in this case into a single space which made everything look weird.

It seem that the Repeater control (and possibly other template based ASP.NET controls) are sensitive to the ASPX formatting. They are not trimming the edges of content that resides inside the template ASPX element, thus making them susceptible for formatting weirdness.

The worst problem of all is that when you use Visual Studio’s auto formating (Ctrl-E, Ctrl-D by default, if I’m not mistaken) it will ruin the layout and you might end up with a Repeater that has an extra space even if you didn’t want it.

I can understand why the edges were not trimmed, so that you can and should be able to enter white spaces as part of your template, but Visual Studio itself when formatting a document to be more clearly read will mess things up and that is the true problem.

While this is not a “real” advanced .NET debugging issue and I didn’t use any cool tools to figure it out it annoying nonetheless 🙂